There, and at the majority of other arenas built for the 2004 Games, nothing remains but decay. In those abandoned monuments to misjudgment, the Greeks might ponder Ozymandias: “‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” They might also ask why, on June 30, when Greece missed a payment to the International Monetary Fund, the International Olympic Committee couldn’t have dipped into its petty cash and found $1.7 billion.

Greece owes an awful lot of money to a lot of people.

But the IOC owes Greece.

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Working out exactly how much the 2004 Olympics cost Greece is tricky. In 2013, Yannis Stournaras, then finance minister, argued that the Games had broken even. That August, he also said Greece would not need another bailout. Other estimates put the cost of the Athens Games at more than €7 billion, perhaps a lot more. Those figures may include upgrades to hospitals and archaeological sites. They do not include the cost of infrastructure projects such as a new airport, an extended and renovated subway and light rail systems.

Hosting major sporting events is not a paying proposition. Sports fans may travel to see the Olympics or a World Cup, but other tourists stay away. IOC insiders like to say that hosting the Games provides “intangible” benefits, though they have backed away in recent years from the grandiose claims that the 1988 Olympics brought democracy to South Korea.

The project was part of a mismanaged economic fantasy that has helped put Greece in a hole.

The 1992 Barcelona Games, held just 15 years after the restoration of democracy in Spain, are the shining example. The Olympics reinvigorated the city, though at great cost, and advertised that the country was open for business with the world. That vague marketing message is supposedly the chief benefit of hosting the Olympics in the 21st century. It is no accident that the last two Olympics were held in booming Beijing and in the shadow of the Canary Wharf office towers in the East End of London. In retrospect, however, the Athens Olympics, staged three and a half years after Greece joined the eurozone, marked the start of economic free fall.

The project was part of a mismanaged economic fantasy that has helped put Greece in a hole. Yet in this, as in so many of its missteps over the last 15 years, Greece was enabled by an agency in the wealthy heart of Europe. The IOC, nestling comfortably among the banks in Switzerland, should have known better. But the IOC, eager to distribute Olympic profits to its stakeholders (the National Olympic Committees and the international sports federations) and to promote the interests of its corporate partners (the sponsors and broadcasters), seems not to care. It brings its circus to town for 17 days and then, after the final fireworks end the most expensive party in the world, leaves, never to return. The host must clear up the broken bottles.

* * *

The painful Greek Olympic legacy is doubly relevant this month. Just nine days after the Greek referendum, the first test event for the Rio 2016 Olympics, the Volleyball World League Finals, start in the Maracanãzinho arena, in the shadow of the Maracanã soccer stadium.

The Athens Games were so expensive, in part, because the Greeks made such a mess of their preparations. The IOC warned the organizers repeatedly about delays. The late rush to completion escalated the costs. Rio has even bigger problems. In April 2014, John Coates, an IOC vice president, called its preparations the “worst ever,” according to the BBC.

In May, Reuters reported that the Games would cost Brazil $13.2 billion and that only about 10 percent of 56 Olympic projects were finished.

Brazil is already struggling with the legacy of the 2014 soccer World Cup, which cost it an estimated $14 billion and left it with hugely expensive stadiums it does not need. If the jungle reclaims the Arena Amazonia in Manaus, Brazilians will not even have the ruins to contemplate.

Some pundits have called for “austerity Olympics,” the name given to the London Games of 1948. While that might capture the mood of the times, IOC members, like the Greek public, have shown a marked reluctance to vote for austerity.

Yet the IOC could solve the problem of where to stage its increasingly costly Games and provide a helping hand to Greece by putting the Games permanently in Athens. Anyone who attended the 2004 Games has happy memories of the event, hot and humid though they were. The Greeks were good hosts. The country has historical and sentimental appeal. Greece was where the ancient Olympics were born. Athens was where the modern Olympics was reborn. Athens has the facilities. They aren’t being used for anything else. They need work, but putting the Games permanently in one place will allow it to become profitable for the host as well as for the IOC.

And the IOC is one of the few international institutions that owes a debt to Greece.

Peter Berlin covered global soccer for 20 years for the Financial Times and then the International Herald Tribune. He is now a freelance journalist covering soccer for, among others, Sports Illustrated.